Happy Spring, y’all!!
What a whirlwind the last month has been. After recovering from an abominable amount of snow days (ha, see what I did there?!) we slid into parent/teacher conferences and then our epic Spring Break Road Trip.
And it was a trip.
Conferences were … predictable. I found out less than a week before that my son had assignment amnesia. Sometime between January and March of this year there was a head injury that resulted in over a dozen missed assignments. You can imagine the shock and horror that played on my son’s face when I informed him of this.
Just kidding. He’s 12. The only thing his face registers is pimples and video game time. In fact, he was quite sure he did most of the missing assignments, naturally. You can imagine the teacher’s shock and embarrassment at having lost all of his painstaking work.
Just kidding, he had never actually done it. Spoiler!
So after wading through the non-verbal shoulder shrugging, eye-rolling, face-palming “conversations” we all agreed on an acceptable amount of work that would be done in a reasonable time limit before any controllers or computer mice would be held. Naturally, I’m a monster who just doesn’t understand life and i’m horribly unreasonable.
In other words, I earned the employee of the month parking spot in my driveway this month.
After threatening any unfinished work would be done on the road or at Legoland, his teachers were quite shocked to see a motivated and productive student the day before break. Go figure!!
Our road trip was awesome…. it’s always interesting to throw a family who is all individually used to and fond of their own separate space together in a truck for 1400 miles, all together all the time sleeping, eating, farting, fighting, screen timing, etc. It’s intense. We are already fairly intense people.
My husband always has this outlook that the kids should just exist in a reality of gratitude when we do things like this. In a perfect world, that would be nice, but it’s not reality for most families. I remember little from my own childhood, but I damn sure remember the 2 family “vacations” we went on. They were road trips to camp grounds. Nothing luxurious. Nothing exotic. Three siblings mostly buckled elbowing and punching each other through California and Nevada.
We tried to keep the expectations to a minimum when it came to behaviors, and I think the kids met those expectations. We stopped to visit with family along the way down to Legoland and the kids got to experience cool stuff like a nice meal where they had to eat what someone they had just met cooked for them. They didn’t get to complain or bitch or whine about what was in front of them. They had to just be polite and deal with it. And guess what? They did! I was so proud…. and then we got in the vehicle to head back to the hotel and we got to deal with all the pent up manners and politeness.
I think i’ll have to make a whole post just on the Legoland experience, but I’ll just say here that overall the kids completely loved the place. The hotel was extra in just the right way. Buffet, germs, lego propoganda, pits of sneezed on, licked and coughed on legos shared by hoards of guests who travel from planes trains and automobiles stopping in for a bit of fun. One evening my husband and I sat chatting while the kids played with other guests building guns and running around the lobby like feral badgers. I looked over and saw two boys literally putting legos in their mouths to break apart other blocks. Then spit them into the community pit. .. In. Their. Mouths. It’s one thing to know it happens, but it’s another to actually see it.
So now we are home readjusting to regular life before school starts up again tomorrow. The kids are thrilled.
Just kidding. I’m pretty sure my son is planning a hostile takeover somewhere to escape this whole middle school hell he is living in right now.
Hope you all enjoyed a bit of a break and here’s to summer vacation! It’s just around the corner!
Sarcasmica 